In October 1969, as the civil war came to an end, amnesty was proclaimed and Soyinka and other political prisoners were released. For the first few months after his release, Soyinka stayed at a friend's farm in the south of France, where he sought solitude. He wrote The Bacchae of Euripides (1969), a reworking of the Pentheus myth. He soon published a book of poetry, Poems from Prison, in London. At the end of the year, he returned to his office as Director of the Cathedral of Drama in Ibadan.
In 1970, he produced the play Kongi's Harvest, simultaneously adapting it as a film of the same title. In June 1970, he completed another play, called Crazy and Stuntmen. Together with the 15-actor troupe of the singapore telephone numbers University of Ibadan Theatre Arts Company, he traveled to the United States, to the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut, where his latest play premiered. It gave them all experience with theatre production in another English-speaking country.
In 1971, his poetry collection A Shuttle in the Crypt was published. Madmen and Specialists was produced in Ibadan that year. Soyinka travelled to Paris to take the lead role as Patrice Lumumba, the first assassinated Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo, in his production of Killer Angels.
In April 1971, concerned about the political situation in Nigeria, Soyinka resigned from his duties at the University of Ibadan and began years of voluntary exile. In July, extracts from his well-known work The Dance of the Woods were presented in Paris.